I thought I was so smart going to Jollibee, the new Filipino fast-food spot near the medical center, on a Monday mid-afternoon. Surely the crowds of Filipino expats hungry for the chain’s fried chicken, burgers and noodles had subsided since the grand opening last Thursday, right?

Wrong. As I pulled into the jammed parking lot at 8001 South Main, just north of its intersection with Old Spanish Trail, I spied a line snaking out of the front door and around the corner, then zig-zagging beneath temporary awnings set up in the parking lot. It was 3 p.m. and rain was pelting down. The jolly bee mascot standing out front had water pouring from its wings in great gouts. Under the awnings and the building overhang, the prospective customers looked slightly damp.

But they were excited and talkative. Co-workers exchanged greetings as they spotted each other in line. Strangers exchanged war stories about how many times they had been to Jollibee in the five days since it opened and how long they had waited to get in the door. A pretty young woman in Daisy Dukes told me her whole family was inside, waiting for her and her boyfriend to pass the threshold.

At the door, young men and women with clipboards did crowd control, taking orders and taking note of large parties that would need to be seated together. When I finally made it inside, the dining room was packed. It looked fancier than I expected for a chicken-and-burger joint, with retro mid-century modern textiles and a flock of sleek lacquered lanterns suspended from the ceiling.

I paid for my food at the counter and wandered around looking for a seat. Not so easy, because the Jollibee chain, which touts its family orientation in its relentlessly cheerful corporate website, has no seating for solo diners. There’s no counter of the sort American burger joints are likely to have, and no little two-tops, either.

It’s basically extended-family heaven. I even spotted a few handwritten “reserved” signs on some of the larger tables, a temporary measure taken to preserve order in the crush. At a swoop of semicircular banquette surrounded by freestanding plastic chairs, I spied Ms. Daisy Duke and her clan, at least ten strong and laughing uproariously.

Eventually a genteel woman named Rose beckoned me to share her table. “I’m just waiting for the rain to stop,” she said,with a glance at the monsoon outside. It was her second visit in search of this particular taste of home. Jollibee is a powerhouse in the Philippines, where it operates over 750 stores. Now it’s expanding internationally in everywhere from Vietnam to Hong Kong to Saudi Arabia, with 26 locations in the United States, most on the West Coast.

This Jollibee is the first in Texas, and with so many Filipinos working at the Medical Center, Houston was a natural choice. Indeed, many of the crowd on Monday were still wearing scrubs. There’s obviously a huge pent-up demand here for the nostalgic flavors of Jollibee’s fried chicken and noodles — particularly its distinctive spaghetti, clad in a slightly sweet tomato sauce laced with hot dog slices and rough-textured sausage cubes along with pinpoints of ground meat, plus a gilding of orange cheese on top.

Not having grown up on this spaghetti, I still found it an agreeable little blast of childhood, and the sweet Filipino topspin made it taste even more like nursery food to me. It’s popular in combination with the fried chicken, which I found a bit jarring but seemed to make everyone else in the place rejoice.

The chicken itself — dubbed “Chickenjoy” in Jollibeespeak — was good and crisp and juicy. It did not awaken in me the ecstasies reported by some of the Filipino expats on Yelp, but that’s to be expected. It’s solidly done.

I’m still coming to terms with the famed Jollibee burger. I ordered the charmingly named Big Yum, which is the basic Yum Burger writ larger (1/3 lb. ) and adorned with lettuce, tomato, cheese, ketchup and mayo. Lots of mayo. Mayo enough to squish the flavor and texture profile.

The ground-beef patty seemed a little alien, in that it had the salty seasoning and uniform, crumbly texture of meatloaf, with not much sear to set off the interior. It was fine in its way, but it took some getting used to. I missed the mustard and onion that are essential to a Texan’s burger pleasure. At $4.29, the Big Yum was not inexpensive.

Rose, my tablemate, extolled the virtues of her Fiesta noodles, a dish that in her home country is known as palabok, and is sauced with ground pork, shrimp, chicharron bits, smoked fish flakes and slices of hardboiled egg. She had ordered it twice in the days since Jolibee opened. And, she confessed, she had done just what I did with the two different fried pies we had ordered: taken a few bites of each, the better to compare and contrast.

Rose preferred the slight tartness of the peach-and-mango pie, a crackly-skinned pastry oblong. I was drawn to the caramelized banana with jackfruit, probably because it seemed more exotic to me. But both were surprisingly good for what they were: a mass-produced fried pie, not some artisanal hand rolled pastry stuffed with fresh fruit.

I pulled up the big tapioca balls in my coconut-pandan freeze, which was a lovely shade of pale green, as the rainstorm continued unabated. “Earlier it was raining while the sun shone,” Rose observed. “In Puerto Rico they say that’s when the witches are getting married,” I told her. “In the Philippines,” she returned, “we say that’s when the buffalo are being born.”

The water buffalo, of course.

Eventually I had to flee across the parking lot in an ankle-deep river. Thanks to an hour of gale-force rains, the line outside Jollibee’s door had finally dispersed.